The Immanent Frame recently began a forum for exploring the question of the Muslim world. The form asks some powerful questions for investigating the conception, construction, and reality of Muslims worlds:

"How has the notion of a “Muslim world” been utilized to mark civilizational and racial difference both historically and in the present? In what ways has the political calculus of the modern nation-state drawn upon idealized or demonized notions of “Muslim countries” and “Muslim actors” to enact its policies?"

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​No, this is not about ‘Perennialism’.  ‘Perrenial’ is an adjective with its own independent meaning.  Though I am using the word ‘perrenial’ here, I am not advocating the transcendent unity of religions.  Thus, if your interest in reading this was only peaked by the polemic opportunity represented by that possibility, you might find the rest of this a waste of time.    

Rather, I want to talk about an aspect of Muslim life in the modern world, which, in spite of how it may appear to we Muslims who experience it, is not, I would argue, entirely exclusive to our experience, but is only our experience of a moral challenge perennially faced by humanity at large.   

In the history of philosophy, this challenge informs the context of the Platonic dialogues.  He wrote at a time when increased commercial and political activity between various Greek city-states forced them to confront the fact of their diverse and often incompatible moral, religious, and social values, raising the question:  Are any set of values universally valid, and if so, on what basis? 

​​“Why are there no Muslim philosophers?” Sudipta Kaviraj posed this question to me while I was studying some critical Western texts of philosophy in the Fall of 2009 with him. Although this is a complicated question – which I do not simply take at face value, given that Kaviraj is himself an important postcolonial thinker – it does point to a significant failure of Muslim thinkers to engage their own intellectual tradition, together with the Western tradition of thought.
 
At the same time, Kaviraj’s question relates to another crucial question raised more recently by Hamid Dabashi, when he asks “Can Non-Europeans Think?”. In his article Dabashi highlights how non-European thought – Muslim thought for our present purposes – is cast by the academy. The problem now is not whether Muslims can or cannot think, but how their thought needs to be reshaped according to Western “styles” of thinking for it to be deemed “philosophy” by Western academics, and not something closer to mythology.